Marx and Mysticism
Part II
So now let’s consider the first of the three points I raised in Part I of this series—namely that when anticapitalists conflate dialectical materialism1 with reductive materialism, they inherently feed into anti-indigenous western supremacism and technocratic fetishization of something mistakenly called “science.”
Reductive materialism is the belief that everything comes down to “stuff,” that the cosmos is comprised entirely of empirically observable matter interacting within the bounds of (at least theoretically) knowable natural laws. Some would also term this belief “reductive scientism.”
It is, of course, impossible to prove this assertion scientifically. In perhaps the ultimate manifestation of Gödelian incompleteness, reductively scientistic materialism relies on axioms that reductively scientistic materialism cannot itself prove. Materialists simply assume that the cosmos consists entirely of matter because that happens to be what suits the materialist agenda.
More to the point, reductive materialism does not have a viable model for consciousness. There are certainly reductively materialistic theories of consciousness that claim viability—but these ultimately fail to account for the subjectivity of the conscious self (or what we call “qualia”).
That is, the reductive materialist can trace the entire material pathway from light striking an object, through that object reflecting light of a certain wavelength, through that wavelength of light striking the sensory apparatus of your eye, to that sensory stimulus in turn stimulating bioelectrical signal in your nervous system and brain. But it cannot account for your subjective experience of color.
Nor can reductive materialism account for your awareness that you are subjectively experiencing color—or for all the mental activity that you might choose to engage in based on that experience: deciding to buy the peaches because they look so ripe and delicious, telling a friend to absolutely not paint their living room that color, writing a poem about the bright blue sky over Gettysburg.
It is, in fact, the project of reductive materialism to deny our direct experience of consciousness—or, perhaps more precisely, to second-guess it. But the reductive materialist invariably excludes one set of conscious experiences from this skepticism: that exception being their own conscious conclusions about reductive materialism.
Ideas, according to the materialist, are accidental properties contingent upon the material conditions. All ideas, that is, except their own mechanistic, reductive view of the cosmos.
It would be bad enough if scientistically reductive materialism were simply wrong-headed. But it’s worse than that. For at the same time as materialists valorize their reductive view of the cosmos, they invariably pathologize the worldviews of indigenous peoples—which are anything but reductive.
Mythic narrative, animism, and other aspects of indigenous belief-systems are, by the measure of the reductive materialist, defective. So the Marxists who decry religion as the Opium des Volkes paint themselves, inadvertently or not, into a corner when it comes to the Navajo, the Yanomami, and the Yoruba.
Can a mountain not be sacred? Is a totem without use? Is there no explanatory power in positing a deity of the crossroads? Not according to the reductive materialist. whatever use such things might appear to have, it is only because even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
And, here again, the materialist insists on self-exclusion. All faith is pathology, except the materialist‘s faith in their own intellectual aptitude.
There is, by the way, absolutely no reason to insist that to be an effective anticapitalist one must utterly disavow the immaterial. I am actually putting forth here a strong argument to the contrary: that reductive materialism is an artifact of white western culture—and therefore counterproductive to the epochal project of anticapitalism and the unmaking of white western hegemony.
But before we get there, let’s be clear. Scientific knowledge—while profoundly utile and transformative—represents an infinitesimal fraction of human knowledge. I know how I felt waking up this morning. I know how to jam over the changes to Green Dolphin Street. I know what my father told me before he died. None of this is scientific knowledge. But it is knowledge nonetheless.
And it is this fullness of subjectively experienced knowledge that ultimately leads people to both the conviction that capitalism must be displaced and, even more critically, to the collective revolutionary action that will bring about that displacement.
A term, it should be noted, that Marx himself never used.